Natural resilience

I have written an op-ed article in The Times today. It's behind
a paywall, but here's my last draft before editing by the
newspaper, together with links.

So long as the cap holds, and
assuming that is the end of it, the Deepwater Horizon spill (up to
600,000 tonnes in total) will now take its place in the oil spill
hall of shame. BP's cavalier incompetence has made this probably the worst oil-spill year since 1979,
the year that saw not only the previous worst rig spill - the Ixtoc
1 platform off Mexico - but also the worst tanker spill, a
collision of two supertankers off Trinidad.

All this, just when things were
going so well in the oil-spill business. The number and collective
size of oil spills (over 7,000 tonnes) has declined in each of the last four decades,
from 25 large spills and over 250,000 tonnes a year in 1970-1979 to
three spills and about 20,000 tonnes a year in 2000-2009: that is a
drop of more than 90%.

No wonder the other oil companies
are livid with BP, a company that spent the last decade and a half
burnishing its reputation as an environmental paragon, apparently
to the detriment of its capacity to manage old-fashioned oil
production safely. `Within the fossil fuel industry itself,'
said the prominent environmentalist Lester Brown in
1998, `some companies such as Enron, British Petroleum, and ...
are already looking to the future, and beginning to invest in
alternative energy sources.' It seems unkind to curse the third
firm he mentioned by naming it, but let's call it
Scallop.

The clean-up will be long and
difficult, and the effects of the spill will be felt for a long
time in the pensions of Britons, the priorities of politicians and
regulators as well as the pelicans of the Gulf. So it might be a
good idea to learn lessons from previous oil spill clean-ups. Some
of these are surprising.

First, be careful not to do more
harm than good. When the Torrey Canyon was wrecked off Cornwall in
1967, spilling 120,000 tonnes of oil, the British government not
only bombed the wreck (and missed with one bomb in four),
but sprayed 10,000 tons of detergents, which were
much more damaging to marine life than the oil itself, then
bulldozed the oil and detergents into the sand on some beaches
where it persisted for longer than if it had been exposed to the
elements.

The mistake was repeated in 1989,
when the Exxon Valdez spilled about 40,000 tonnes in Prince William
Sound. Thousands of volunteers were sent out to wash rocks with hot
water, which helped kill lots of microbes that would
otherwise have eaten the oil.

Speaking of microbes, do not
underestimate nature's powers of recovery. After most big oil
spills, scientists are pleasantly surprised by how quickly the oil
disappears and the marine life reappears. This is true even in
Alaska, where the sheltered waters, low temperatures and abundant
wildlife conspired to make the slick damaging and persistent. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationsays on its website: `What scientists have
found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal
habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly
resilient.' A scientist who led some of the research into the Exxon
Valdez says that `Thoughts that this is going to kill
the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions'.

When the Braer went aground off
Shetland in 1993 and spilled 85,000 tonnes of oil, storms quickly
dispersed the oil, so the effect on most of the local wildlife was
barely measurable. As one scientific report drily noted, after
running through a list of undetected effects on birds, shore life
and seabed creatures, `five otters were found dead in the oil spill
area. However, three of these were killed by vehicles, one was
recovered before the oil could have reached it and the cause of
mortality of the fifth did not appear to be oil contamination.'
(One of the road kills was allegedly caused by a television crew's
car.)

This rapid recovery was also a
signature of the last big Gulf rig spill, the Ixtoc 1 disaster off
Mexico in 1979. Although the number of turtles took decades to
recover, much of the rest of the wildlife bounced back fairly
rapidly. `To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we
thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for
decades', Luis Soto of the National Autonomous University of
Mexico told a newspaper this year. `But within a
couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal
again.'The warm waters and strong
sunshine of the Gulf of Mexico are highly conducive to the chemical
decomposition of oil by `photo-oxidation', and are stuffed full of
organisms that actually like to eat the stuff - in
moderation.

Indeed, the sea floor in the Gulf
is rich in `cold seeps' -- communities of tube worms and other
organisms that live off oil naturally seeping from beneath the
seabed. (The annual flow of oil through such seeps is about half the total spill.) Hundreds of these
clusters of clams and tube worms have been found since the 1980s in
the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, living off the microbes that
eat the oil.

Such ecosystems are not equipped
to cope with being inundated with so much oil even if it is their
food, but one Texas scientist told the New York Times that `the gulf is such
a great fishery because it's fed organic matter from oil...it's
pre-adapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete
disaster is not true.'

Another lesson to learn is that
the media covers the disaster and not the recovery. When the Sea
Empress spilled 70,000 tonnes of oil off Pembrokeshire in 1996, the
oil was quickly dispersed. The impact on the 500,000 pairs of birds
that breed nearby was relatively small, but the impact on the
500,000 tourists who normally visited the beaches of Pembrokeshire
each year- and the businesses that relied on them - was dire. In about a year Louisiana's tourist
businesses will be protesting that their beaches are now clean and
would the tourists please come back, but the media will largely
ignore them. Good news is no news.

The final lesson is that the
environmental threats that matter are the slow, continuous ones,
not the telegenic sensations like oil spills. BP's spill is known
to have killed just over 1,300 birds so far. Just one wind farm, at
Altamont Pass in California, was until recently known to kill perhaps 1,300 birds of prey every year.
If BP really wants to kill birds, it should indeed go beyond
petroleum and into wind, an industry that kills far more rare birds
per joule of energy produced than oil does.

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